Of course they are. “The shareholders” doesn’t have to mean the long term owners - it can mean the people who have invested, saw line go up, and sold. They are happy, the CEO is happily off to a new job sailing down on a golden parachute, and the customers after being shown the middle finger…

…preorder the next big title. Shit.

People that say this haven't played the older games and the new games. Ubisoft makes consistently good games. They're all fairly derivative of each other and have a lot of feature and mechanic crossover, but the writing and game design is, on the whole, quite good. They suck for selling "cosnetics" that have unique features or abilities that youv cannot otherwise get in the game. And Valhalla and Odyssey were padded with content to encourage buying the boosters, and upgrading your ship took entirely too many resources. But if you're getting level gated then you're just plain not engaging with the content because the issue is overleveling, not underleveling. If you're trying to sprint through the main story, I'm sorry but you're playing the game wrong. But the new games have far less jank than the old ones. The stealth is different but works more or less the same. I think people have very rose tinted glasses when it comes to assassin's creed. The old games are barely playable, you're constantly jumping to your death because of the shitty controls, desynchronizing for getting caught during the shitty eavesdrop and stalk sections. Like the only thing they did better was social stealth which Valhalla had. If you don't like health bars and upgrade paths that's fine but the new AC games are legitimately just better games. And this discounts Prince of Persia, Frontiers of Pandora and star wars outlaws which were all recent fantastic games. Fuckin Rayman. Ubisoft makes good games they just have shitty business practices and treat their customers poorly. But they make good games.